by Massive Voodoo

Hey Jungle Painters,

some information dropped in recently and we recognised it has not been shared on the jungle blog yet. MV's Figure-Art Artbooks are now available in the US in the Cool Mini or not-Store. Many thanks for the kind words our friends from CMON wrote to introduce MV to their news:

"For all of you die hard hobbyists, painting enthusiasts,
pro-painter/modeler groupies and over-all fan-boys the names Massive
Voodoo, Roman Lappat and Raffaele Picca are common place. For those
novices just entering into this world these are names to remember,
revere and look to for inspiration and instruction! Cool Mini or Not is
proud to say that we have the opportunity to make available to you this
book compiled by the Massive Voodoo crew showcasing 144 projects they
have worked on. As Roman and Raffaele would say, "Keep on happy
painting" and "Best Wishes"!

Thank you for such kind words!

If you live in the US take this opportunity to make one of these copies that some monkeys paddled across the ocean, yours! You can find them in the CMON-Online-store!
If you are interested to get one copy for you and you don't live in the US check other suppliers of the book behind this link!We wish you a lot of joy and inspiration with the book!
Your MV-Team

by Massive Voodoo

Good Monday Morning Jungle Painters,

today Massive Voodoo went back in its deep jungle archives to bring you a small tutorial about how to create a Wall piece from plaster. It is similiar to the article of Raffa on how to make a brick wall but in the same moment it is not similiar as other techniques and materials were used.

Well, this article is written by Roman, BUT the person who builds up the base is Kurt, our friend from the Pumpkin Painters. Deep in the archives of the jungle Roman found the photos of Kurt aka DarkEzekiel working on his base while he was visiting us in Augsburg a long time ago.

- plaster
- Material to build a form/mold with.
In this example the form was made from architecture cardboard.
You could also do this with Lego for example.
- a tool to carve, like an old blade or a sculpting tool
- superglue
- water
- a pen

What kind of plaster should I use?
We recommand using harder plaster, like dental plaster or kind of. You can still carve it, but if you use too plaster that is too soft after drying you will encounter problems while painting your wall piece as the colours will get sucked into the material. Just annoying and demotivating.

Step 1:

Think about which kind of wall you want to create and make a sketch of it.
Try to find a shape that you like to create, take real life examples as reference if needed. Now take the architecture cardboard. The ones you can buy have different thickness and we recommand not taking the big ones. These used here were thick about one centimeter as far as I can remember and suggest.

Kurt signed his wall shape to both of the cardboard-parts and cut out each single piece with a cutter. Take care and don't hurt yourself.

Then he used superglue to put them together. You can already achieve a wall with one single piece of card board, but Kurt wanted a big column piece. Last, he glued a full wall of cardboard to one side to close the mold. Three pieces in the end.

While glueing take care that everything is glued properly or you will have a mess later on. Sadly I can not provide you with a photo of the basic form itself as this went missing somehow. Really, this is coming from deep out of the past.

Step 2:
Next, take a seperate bowl or plastic cup to mix the plaster with water like described on the plaster instruction. When mixed properly place the plaster into your form. You will recieve something that looks like this and after it is dry you can already start with carving your basic stones into the plaster.

Step 3:
As the mold that Kurt made just allowed him to carve on the
walls front side he had to work on the other sides still to make it an
authentic wall piece from all angles. For sure, if you only do one side
of a wall you are fine with carving one side. If you are done with the carving you can carefully cut away the
cardboard to set your wall piece free and bring it to your base. If your wall piece is heavy, like the one of Kurt, than we recommend to pin it to your base.

Step 4:
Take your time while carving and think about detail damage and detail rubble if the wall is meant to be old and aged. Such detail damage will bring a more interesting light situation to your paintwork later on. It already can be seen on this photo:

You can use Hirst-Art Parts or plaster rests to place some rubble on the ground.
Well, that's it. Have fun with carving your wall of choice.
Thanks to Kurt for his guest presence in this article.

by Massive Voodoo

Actual status of the seats available is 11/18.
As said, there won't be more classes with this specific topic and no basing classes from Roman until next year. So if you want to join, now is your time.

The class is held in german language, but there is the possibility for non-german speakers to attend to the classtoo, if they are up to english language.With big thanks to Mike, the jungle now can offer those of you interested in taking part the full registration information in english language.
Soon we will have a closer look on the sponsoring elements, thanks for the support to:

by Roman aka jar

Hello Jungle painters,

today I am able to show you another finished project of mine.

It is pretty hard to say it was fun as the theme/topic of this figure really makes me very sad. I got myself into reading a lot about the injustice that happened to the continent of Africa and no need to say it: still is on today. By reading a history magazin which explained the so far known depths of african culture and early history I really found myself stuck deep in a topic which ... ya, I got no words for what I feel about it, but I read on and discovered and learned a lot for myself.

That is why I took the chance to put those feelings into a miniature to try to explain.

I had the chance to get my hands on an upcoming release by Forged Monkey, called "Jamal",
but my personal goal was to do a conversion of him, but enough talk, I let photos of that bust speak now:

Juva, 1883

Conversion of Forged Monkey's Jamal

The bust itself is not big, rather small, but it was a joy to learn how to approach such a small but meaningful conversion, how to tackle to paint such a dark skin tone and well I truely learned a lot and prepared a full article about the project for our massive voodoo readers, coming to the jungle in future tutorial voting. I entered the bust in the 5th-Dimension's actual painting contest in category "Tall Tales", a category that is searching for story telling. My personal thoughts on the topic are visible for me in the result and tell a story in this small bust. What do you think?

If you want to see more photos of Juva,
please follow the link to Putty & Paint.

Following you can find a little size comparision to see how big the bust is - with my ordinary hand:

And a little preview on the article that is soon to speak about the making of "Juva, 1883":

Keep on happy painting and a great weekend to you all!
Best WishesRoman

by Roman aka jar

by Massive Voodoo

Thursday marks the jungle week with Tutorial Voting.
This time Massive Voodoo's year of the painter is proud to bring you two articles you can vote for via comment, the winner will be put to the blog early next week. Voting lasts until Monday morning the count is made. Your choices today are:

#02
This article is something different. Roman speaks of Motivation during a figure project, tells about how you can phase the different ones, tells about ups and downs of these phases and how each stage has is own issues. He tries to give you hints and tips on how you can handle each stage's problems. If the jungle call is answered there might be more voices to this topic from the MV-Team.

by Massive Voodoo

this beautiful morning we are happy to present to you another Miniatures Unpacked.

This time we are taking a closer look on a very cool figure, which is not available in a regular store but with email request and with only 100 copies made, as far as we know. We talk about ...

Enrique Velasco aka Emuse contacted the jungle to have a look on this model and so we did. It is a beautiful piece even the theme of the figure is nothing uncommon. He reminds us a little bit of Heroquest or Dungeon & Dragons. A cool barbarian dude in a striking cool pose.

The model arrives in a plastic blister with foam inside and a card showing the beautiful promo paintjob.

Opening up the blister you find a base, legs, torso, swordarm, shield with fist all cast in white metal.

The quality of the cast is very good, only subtile mould lines had to be removed. Easy going there.
The fitting of the parts is also good, but some small gaps have to be filled.

The pose of this character really invites to a dungeon scene and Raffa and Roman already used the model for explanation on a dungeon base during the last private coaching with Matthias.

Test with the promo paintjob card

And the WIP bases of Roman and Raffa. Dungeon-party-time:

Well, a really a nice character and a classic hero of old, long forgotten Fantasy genres. No overdoing here, a very unique sculpting style, a beautiful mix of realism and comic, just like Heroquest but much cooler.

If you are interested in getting your copy of Aran, the Barbarian write an email toaranthebarbarian---at---gmail---dot---com to order.

Keep on happy painting and take care while strolling the dungeons!
Your MV-Team

I was in the middle of finishing my version of Sha'un, Ram Tribe Warrior and very often if a bigger project comes to an end energies and will are fading away as the final work often gets annoying in such a large piece. I was happy to have Peter and Bene doing a painting evening with me that particular day and I got distracted from the beastman bust. I was searching for something easy, something quick for relaxation and did choose to paint up a Slayer by Games Workshop.

After I prepared and glued the Slayer right out of the box, I primed him black and used a mix of a sand colour and red for the basic tone to find into the piece. I did not grant any advantage with this colour, I just wanted to be able to quickly see where this might lead. This tone could be used as basic for the hair and the skin at once, at least this was the plan. Use the airbrush for this step.

In such quick projects I do not think to much about what happens, I rather enjoy to paint without my brain occoupied. So the initial plan changed again. I airbrushed more natural skintone to the whole piece and afterwords did some rough paintwork on the trousers, stone and metal parts. Really slapping colour there, my basic tone was the neutral Fortress grey and while it was still wet I slapped in highlights with a stronger blue grey. In this step I was already able to set highlight areas. Pow! Pow!

So the next step was particular stupid. Hiding all the figure behind the masking tape just to spray the beard and mohawk in his basic tone, but it was fun and after the work with the Putty went pretty easy it did not feel as awkward as expected.

After removing the masking tape I did paint the metal parts in bronze and painted stripes with a darker blue grey - it was the same colour as for the stone but with an additional black to it to darken it - to the trousers.

Now it was time to bring in some depth. A quick way to do so I enjoy for fast projects is using Army Painter washes, mainly the Strong Tone. They are particular good as they dry out matt compared to other washes. I used the brownish Strong Tone on the whoole figure and some of the Green Tone ont he base. To avoid a big mess try to bring it on with plan. The rules of zenithal light on where to place shadow helps me here. In the end it is still a mess, but a controlled one I can work on with.

I don't fear the step of washing as I know the next step - cleaning it up with repainting base tones and adding the first highlights - is following after it. That is what I have done. Using skintone to clean up the skin areas, added some highlights in the volumes hit by zenithal light. Same done to the hair, trousers and stone parts. Also on the bronze.

Upside down you can see how I used the glazes on the blades of the axes and how I reworked highlights there. On such quick projects I do enjoy to bring in texture as I do on long term projects, such can be achieved by using a brighter tone and dab it to the stone for example or painting thin stripes to a material.

Meanwhile about 2~3 hours passed working on the dwarf and the three of us decided to do a in between photo of all projects under the brush this painting night. From left to right you can see the WIP-Dwarf, Bene's WIP of an upcoming Forged Monkey release, followed by my version of Sha'un in late WIP-stage and Peter's version of Sha'un during Work in Progress.

Work went on at the dwarf and I decided to push the skintone to more highlights. I choose to paint some simple tattoo pattern to him by using a dark blue grey again, but this time added a tiny drop of skintone to the tattoo colour. This helps to make the tattoo look more natural when painted on skintone, instead of looking like... well, painted with a big blue marker by some goblin. I added Verdigris with GW's technichal colour quickly to the bronze parts. On a quick model like this I rather do everything pretty fast without getting stuck too much in detail work. For example the dirt on the trousers was just done by the use of the Wash, some highlights painted afterwards, but wait there is blood already ...

Well, yes, blood. I used the airbrush and some of GW's new technical blood colour to spray it to the figure to make him look jumping right out of a slaughterhouse. I mean he is a slayer, he is supposed to look like that in battle. I decided to secure the face with masking putty to have no big accidents here with the blood.

The basework recieved some more controlled green washes to make several areas look more interesing. Even added a drop of black colour to the green wash to have it darker in the lowest areas. In this step I also painted his trappings in the beard in metal tones.

I used the brush to create tiny scratches here and there, little wounds to our little hero.

Next step was adding moss to the base to underline the greens I have painted before. You might recognize, that even without a perfect plan there is always a bigger picture to think of. Photobomb.

Next step was using some grass pieces of the company Polák, but only single ones to be added to the moss. A small detail that looks interesting in the end.

I used matt varnish to place them. Love to use matt varnish at base detail work

as it leaves no traces or accidents like superglue sometimes does, it just disappears.

I added some dirt and small moss parts to the feet of the slayer to make him look authentic running through hsi environment.

Last steps were adding a stronger shadow here and there or adding a final highlight here and there.

I'd say this is how the quick painted Slayer was done. The last thing I did was using the airbrush and matt varnish to get a grip on the shiny beard, caused by the blood accident and lucky me - it worked well.

This quick model really helped me to relax and to get back to the beastman once more for the though work there that drains so much energies. Thank you Slayer. Never underestimate the healing powers of a quick project, healing power for your mind and heart.

My tips when doing a quick project just for fun:

- Don't use too many different colours, for example I have used the same for the axes, stones and trousers, try to stay in a simple colour scheme

- be brave to use washes, but control them to have a better looking result

- Think ahead: Don't worry if at one step something looks awkward, don't get distracted or frustrated by it. It will change to the good when you paint on. In the best case you already know what you are doing and what will be the next step. Don't worry too much, have fun and be self-confident.

I hope you enjoyed the article, let me know what you think and if you got questions please feel free to ask them via comment.

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Welcome to the Jungle...

... MASSIVE VOODOO’s jungle, where some apes share their thoughts and ideas around their beloved passion, the hobby of miniature painting and sculpting.

Feel welcome to come and check the jungle for tons of articles, interesting tutorials, creative competitions and the simple joy of happy painting hidden behind every tree. We hope that everyone finds their own banana in here, if not do not hesitate to ask the apes. We are more than happy for you to post in the comments section to help turn this jungle into the lush, overgrown painting corner we hope it will become.